“The Fantastic Four: First Steps” Is Good Summer Fun

The Fantastic Four: First Steps (Matt Shakman, 2025) 3½ out of 5 stars

Though Matt Shakman has previously only made one feature film (the 2014 Cut Bank), he has long worked in the television arena, most notably as the director and executive producer of the 2021 Marvel series WandaVision. A former child actor (the late 1980s Growing Pains spinoff series Just the Ten of Us among his credits), he has a fine way with performers. In the latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), The Fantastic Four: First Steps, he demonstrates full command of modern-day visual effects (VFX) and production design, as well. The result is a solidly entertaining new episode in the seemingly never-ending MCU saga.

I have lost the overarching thread of (and interest in) this simultaneously complex and simplistic multiverse (the former because of the overwhelming plethora of subjects and the latter because of the paradoxically reductive structure of each iteration of an end-of-the-world narrative). This does not mean that individual movies cannot stand out in specific ways. Post-Infinity Saga, there has come the mess of Eternals—and merely passable efforts such as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Captain America: Brave New World, and Thunderbolts*—but also a powerful winner like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. First Steps is more towards the middle than the top, but has effective mise-en-scène and striking aesthetics on its side.

The place is New York City on Earth 828 and the time is four years after the cosmic accident that turned four astronauts into superheroes. They are Reed Richards (aka “Mr. Fantastic”), Sue Storm (aka “The Invisible Woman”), Ben Grimm (aka “The Thing”), and Johnny Storm (aka “The Human Torch”). Reed and Sue are married, Ben is their close friend, and Johnny is Sue’s brother. They are a tight-knit family through blood and shared love, which is one of the film’s major motifs (and a compelling one at that). Pedro Pascal (Freaky Tales), Vanessa Kirby (Pieces of a Woman), Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Hold Your Breath), and Joseph Quinn (Season 4 of Netflix’s Stranger Things) star, in the above order, as our protagonists.

We’ve seen this quartet on the big screen before, first in 2005 and 2007 with an appealing cast and a decent-enough script for Part 1 (not so much for the second one), and then again in 2015 for the disastrous attempt at a reboot, part of a plan to bring the characters into the MCU fold from Twentieth Century Fox. To this new movie’s credit—courtesy of a mostly smart screenplay by Josh Friedman and Eric Pearson and Jeff Kaplan & Ian Springer—we are spared the full origin story, which instead is breezily recapped in an archival montage within the main plot. We are not here to learn how the Fantastic Four (a team name heavily used in media and marketing on this iteration of the world) gained their powers, but to see how and why they use them.

At the start of the film, Sue discovers she is pregnant, news which Reed takes with not-uncommon initial apprehension (and also excitement); Ben and Johnny are quite taken with the idea. Unfortunately, before they can celebrate, an alien creature—the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner, Wolf Man)—arrives on Earth to announce the imminent destruction of the planet by a being known as Galactus. Johnny chases her into the upper atmosphere but she escapes with ease.

The rest of the movie focuses on the group’s battle with both Galactus (Ralph Ineson, The Creator) and the Silver Surfer (whose actual name, as we learn, is Shalla-Bal). Galactus is willing to spare Earth if Reed and Sue will give up their baby (soon to be born with the name Franklin, ostensibly without powers, despite Galactus’ interest), but they refuse, much to the consternation and anger of the rest of the globe’s population, who until recently adored the heroes. We are stronger as a species when we stick together, irrespective of our differences, however. That’s the message of First Steps, and I am here for it. Soon enough, would-be rioters return their support to the Fantastic Four’s efforts.

The visuals harken back to the retro-futuristic look of the early 1960s animated Hanna-Barbera television show The Jetsons. Props, costumes, and architecture from that era combine with high-tech gadgetry to create eye-catching designs and compositions. We also sometimes cut to what looks like the late 1960s cartoon version of the comic books (also from Hanna-Barbera), making the entire experience a meta one (this is nothing unusual for the MCU, given Marvel comics creator Stan Lee’s cameos in each film while he was still alive). The fact that Quinn looks and acts like a young Robert Downey Jr. only heightens this sensation. It all works, though, to create a rollicking good time.

Still, the well-worn trajectory of these movies is by now a little tiresome. Huge stakes do not always produce maximum engagement. If you’ve seen one alien monster try to kill the entire human race, you’ve kind of seen them all. Within that context, The Fantastic Four: First Steps produces occasionally arresting results, including a gripping scene of childbirth in the middle of an action sequence. Despite the title, it’s not as original as it might like to be, but it nevertheless delivers what summer movies should. It’s clobbering time, so let’s get to it.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.